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I've spent some time over the last few months working with a IBM SmartCloud Entry system running on a IBM POWER P740 connecting with storage services via IBM Systems Director to a V7000 Storage system. Setting it up and connecting to all the other IBM POWER systems in the cloud can be complicated and time consuming, along with the setup of Systems Director and ensuring all the license are working can be difficult. So I thought with the increased support of Shared Storage Pools and what looks like the simplicity of the setup I should be able... [More]

As much as IBM Systems Directors once setup up is a great tool for managing your IBM Power systems, it in that initial set-up period is a complete pain to debug. I as much as anyone else completely hate it when its not working. As its the base virtualisation framework for Cloud on Power I've spend a lot of time with it over the years and there always seems to be a new problem and error that I've not seen before. So just as I continue to work on issues, I'm going to try to continue to log the errors and fixes that... [More]

For some time I've followed my own little document on how to set-up IBM Systems Director after reading the Implementing IBM SmartCloud Entry on POWER Systems using the PS703 BladeCenter H Reference Configuration guide. This has given me the basic framework some time ago on how to setup IBM Systems Director (ISD), Storage Control, and SmartCloud Entry that I use here at the IIC Hursley. Things have changed considerably since then, in fact its now much easier to setup ISD... [More]

In this blog I'm going to cover installing ICCT (IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool) also know as ICON, now I know there is lots out there on installing this tool. As per usual I have trouble finding it, so into my developerWorks blog it goes, and more so this one is driven around the install of AIX. Along with this I will be detailing a few things I do to make managing the system easier. First a little information about this tool -
ICCT is part of the IBM Virtual Appliance Factory tools. ICCT implements a... [More]

So you've got your SmartCloud Entry system up, it looks all lovely, snazzy and is happily deploying your PowerVM images. Life is great, so your showing off your new Cloud to the department and someone asks; "How you do a capture of the instance". No problem you think, click the capture button and BANG! it fails..
Panic, why the hell does it not work, and what does that message mean?
"Problem Taking instance snapshot.
CYX4713E Explanation: Cannot take snapshot from instance... [More]

So far he best method that I have found to move images about between systems is to use the ICCT server as the staging for the OVA file, coping that data there first before you move it to your other environments. First ensure that the ICCT/Staging server has sufficient space to store the image as the export job will unzip the raw disk image from the V7000 storage. So if your disk is 25Gb you will need 25G (+/-1 or 2G) to stage the raw disk before it creates the ova that you can import. In my case our server has a 100G disk that... [More]

If working on System director and you are trying to import your data source and you see the following error - [scesd01:root] /root # smcli mkdatasource -c svc -f /root/.ssh/id_rsa -v V7000 -i 172.19.80.241 Adding the data source ... DNZSAL234E : An unknown error has occurred. Ask the TPC administrator to check the log files to determine the cause. Then you are running a downlevel version of storage control (should be 4.2.2 mine was 4.2.1.98), so go to IBM Fix Central and download all the latest fixes for Systems Director 6.3. Once you have... [More]

As mentioned you can use SCE to manage your environments, deploy, capture systems and import new appliances. But first you need to ensure a few things are set up, s o click 'Configure the Cloud' - From here we can do a number of important tasks, these are configure Network, Cloud Settings, Expiration, and Approval. Network - As you can see from the image above we have a number of VLANs set-up. SCE uses these IP pools to deploy the systems too, so we will need to set aside some IP to this environment. It can be as many as you want or have... [More]

IBM SmartCloud Entry is cloud management software that is built on the vitalisation foundation framework, this is the base software that a number of IBM Clouds solutions work from. It is designed to enhance platform management for the end-user with simple virtualization management, enabling clients to quickly and easily build private clouds. First log into the Cloud - url - http://<address>:8080/cloud/web/login.html The default ID for the cloud administrator is 'admin' with the password of 'passw0rd' (of course you have changed this... [More]

Now we have everything the way we want, we can think
about working with our projects, users and accounts. From this we can
manage our usage of the SmartCloud and the workloads we are going to be
deploying, creating, managing and re-sizing. First
begin by creating the users that you want, all users are created equal
until you put them in the relavant accounts and projects. Users Select Users -> Select New User ->
Fill in the details as you require.
If you select 'admin privileges' then they have visibility of... [More]